contemplative education - Ramsey Affifi

Confronting ecologies and identities through Trickster Pedagogy

(this post is my contribution to a co-authored AAACS presentation with Nathan Hauser, May 12, 2023).

Sometimes Tricksters throw themselves under their own bus. I once brought Starbucks coffee to drink during a lecture on the impact of economic globalisation to Scottish students. Feigning nonchalance, I continued to teach as normal. But I was enlivened with anticipation, waiting for the contrast between my actions and my topic to be discovered.

But what if no one noticed? Trickster Pedagogy is only just beginning. Do I make the cup logo more visible? Or take more frequent sips to increase the chance of it being seen? Maybe I should break the class into groups, tasked with investigating how globalisation has creeped into our learning space. (Their Canadian teacher might then get spotted). Or do I let it go, accepting some students have observed it, and not all educational experiences require my guidance to digest?

If discovered, the pedagogy continues. Do I steer how students interpret the dissonance? If so, when and how? Do I eventually confess to the setup? Will doing so serve the ongoing meaning-making of the experience? Keeping silent may foster a skeptical attitude towards experts, or a need for students to scrutinise their own contradictions. But it might also generate apathy if students deem the problem is too ubiquitous to change. It might normalise the idea that it is ok to do the talk but not the walk, or at least the idea that it is normal to have such abnormalities in one’s (apparently?) socially conscious teachers. Admitting to the set-up might suggest other tricks are in store, “easter eggs’ like in a Stanley Kubrick film, and raise sensitivity and attention in general. Or it might foreground trickery as a teaching method, and stimulate my students’ desire to experiment with this pedagogy in turn. It also might re-establish my possibly jeopardised authority, for better and worse. My ego might compel me to confess, even if this conflicts with my pedagogical wisdom.

Trickster Pedagogy role in ecologising education

The hidden curriculum of school systems is itself tricking us into unecological ways of thinking, doing and being, even if it is ‘about’ ecological topics. Luckily, trickery is itself a way out. Here I outline two ways Trickster Pedagogy exposes and/or disrupts unecological educational patterns, and possibly reorients them more ecologically: 1) the way it exposes the relationship between explicit and implicit; and 2) how it can confront students with ecological levels and paradox. For each, I will briefly outline how Trickster Pedagogy works, give examples, and explain why it is important for ecologising education.

The explicit, the implicit and the complicit

Trickster pedagogy counters the growing trend of explicit learning intentions and reduction of ambiguity in education. This approach risks habituating students to neatly structured learning, overlooking the unpredictable and complex nature of the real world. The world isn’t organized into easy propositions or models. To think otherwise is itself a terrible trick. It’s full of surprises, uncertainties, and ambiguous phenomena requiring patience and comfort with uncertainty. “Explicitification” can reduce people’s resilience in facing life’s inherent uncertainties and reduce our ability to sustain attention towards ill-defined situations or problems. It can also foster the misconception that uncertainty is insignificant or controllable in learning, and limit our capacity to appreciate the evolving, tacit nature of both human and non-human worlds—an urgent concern for educators navigating the complexities of the Anthropocene.

By merging pedagogy and curriculum, trickster pedagogy reconnects the means and ends of learning, fostering a more holistic understanding of the world around us.

Encountering koans

A koan is a short anecdote which sometimes presents a monk’s cryptic response to a novice’s question. One, for example advises “if you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Koans show the value some Buddhist traditions place in answering by not answering at the level expected by the asker. The answer provided introduces an ambiguity or a paradox which forces the asker to consider the relationship between question and response, and to confront unconscious assumptions underlying the question in the first place. Many koans are not accessible to casual readers because the topic engaged is not a living problem for them. Indeed they are rooted in particular contexts of Buddhist practice. For a Trickster Pedagogue, the question is how to set up koan-like confrontations between a students’ expectations and alternative ways of handling what they are exploring.

As educators, we know explicit and implicit curricula are in constant interplay, one affecting the other, as what we do and how we do it co-inform one another, and as both interact with ourselves and our students across time. We can disrupt explicit curricula explicitly, by creating an expectation and then challenging it, in ways our students know is intended. Or we can disrupt implicit curricula implicitly, such as when we shift the tone of the room by changing our voice or turning off a light, without ever explaining what is going on.

But we can also play with congruence and incongruence across these modalities, creating explicit expectations and shirking them through how we implicitly engage with those expectations; or we can let implicit framings provide a context that we then defy explicitly. Like koans, the educational experience operates cross-modally, revealing not only that the content of some expectation leads astray, but that even the style, logic, habit, or some other hidden subordinate supportive structures of that belief were themselves complicit.

Experiencing crossmodal relationships and indeed incommensurabilities acquaints the student and teacher to the kinds of shifts entailed in ecological thinking. For example, upon hearing an environmental educator articulate that ‘the problem with the current globalising zeitgeist is that people are operating in a mechanistic worldview. They see things in linear cause and effect relations. If only they saw things more holistically, we could transition towards sustainability’, the trickster pedagogue might ask: ‘that is a nice explanation for what is happening. What ‘cause’ do you propose to get to this holistic worldview?’ The ultimate solution to this question is not to provide such a cause, which is directly asked for in the question, but to realise that the framing itself relied upon the very kind of thinking it was calling out. This would be a koan-like trick.

Trickster pedagogy and classroom relationships

Being a trickster can seem scary to some teachers because of the different kinds of relationships and responsibilities it brings out. In this section, I present three different relational dynamics that can arise through trickery: 1) how trickery can magnify and expose teacher vulnerability, 2) how it can threaten and restore trust, and 3) how it develops and makes transparent the ecological nature of ‘teacher identity.’ These situations are rich for critically interrogating and redeveloping more flourishing relationships with self, other humans, and the more-than-human.

Making oneself vulnerable

Like telling a joke, or acting out a role (themselves often tricks), tricks can fail. Setting up an experience which risks landing flat is more self-exposing than some other pedagogies. Further, we might intend our tricks to open scenarios electrified with drama or excitement, but this depends not only on the skill of our execution but on the “buy-in” from our students. Students’ lack of emotional engagement can be highly embarrassing or feel like rejection. When our tricks involve topics in which we are ourselves emotionally invested, especially those pertaining to our highest values, these feelings only magnify. And so teachers might resist the drama for fear of such vulnerability.

Cultivating the capacity to be vulnerable, and to support another when vulnerable, is important for a world in turmoil. The illusion of control exacerbates the ecological crisis. In our experience, with an open attitude, the occasional failed trick can deepen classroom relationships, humanising the teacher in the eyes of the students, fostering a learning community, and disarming the space of what’s then possible.

Threatening and developing trust

That said, tricks can also be emotionally disruptive and lead to socially complex situations for a teacher to navigate. I remember the time two experienced teachers taking a professional development Master’s course with me became quite hostile after a trick. I had set a task where students were told their online discussions would be assessed according to a rubric that would be provided. As the online discussions progressed, a student soon enough raised the question: “How can we know if we are doing this discussion correctly if we haven’t been given the rubric?” After letting the question sit for a while, I jumped in: “Yes, how would you know? What does good quality mean to you given your insights so far?” Answers from students trickled in at first, but gradually the discussion thread was tumbling with momentum, splintering off further thoughts and questions not merely about ‘quality’ in this context, but also about the function of assessment. After the online discussions, we reconvened in class, and I said, “I told you a rubric would be provided, but I didn’t say who would be creating and using it to evaluate your work.” My students soon realised what was happening. Response ranged from amusement to anger, highlighting assumptions about the nature and purposes of education. Confrontation with implicit assumptions can be visceral in a way not easily achieved through other pedagogies, so important work needs to follow to make sense of the experience and rebuild trust. In some way, this means being even less of a trickster than the average teacher, so as to connect at the level of the person and not through our ascribed social roles.

Exploring teacher identities

My Initial Teacher Education students are working out new identities. There are many competing voices on what that means, and some of them do not tend in directions that ultimately sustain and flourish, themselves or others.

I am interested in what ways ‘teacher personas’ are tricks, and paradoxically how they may actually enable the experiencing, sharing and developing of more authentic identities. If teaching is an art, do we, as Ursula Le Guin suggests, “lie to tell the truth?” I sometimes reflect on this paradox with my students, as of course, my ‘teacher persona’ is prone to do, opening questions about the nature of the self and relationships.

For example, as a teacher, I have a manner of being, a way I speak and am silent, listen and curate, foreground and background, that is sometimes very different from how I am when not in the classroom. Teaching is a performance. But it is not so simple as to say I am pretending to be something I am not. Sometimes I feel like aspects, or possibilities, of who I am are brought out, elaborated and distilled, through the kind of concentrating space that is ‘being a teacher in a classroom’. Sometimes I ‘try on’ a way of being for reasons that seem to make educational sense. When I feel what it is like, and what kind of self emerges through the subsequent interactions that ensue, I sometimes realise that this way of being, once a mask, is in fact an essential part of who I am becoming, or want to become. Perhaps the fact that this mask suggested itself, and not some other, indicates something of the dialectic between the truth and the trick. Perhaps not. In any case, I experiment with students in an ecological alternative between naive essentialism and constructivist views that might otherwise threaten our capacity to develop teacher identities grounded in deepening values, while inviting the active shared discovery our own true masks. (for earlier reflections on masks, see On teaching oneself).

Thanks to my inspiring friend, the Maestro Trickster, Anthony Weston.

May 12, 2023

For a later published paper on related ideas, see Affifi & Hensley (2024)

Affifi, R. & Hensley, N. (2024). Trickster teaching and the anthropocene: Disrupting the explicitification of pedagogy, people and planet. Environmental Education Research. DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2024.2434608

Artistry as opening to the heart of educational tensions

Like artists, teachers face situations where they must make sense of and respond to dynamic tensions. For artists, this may involve things like the interplay between light and dark, detail and blurriness, foreground and background, and, of course, the relationship of these tensions with one another. Educators may have versions of these same aesthetic problems, but unlike the artist, they occur within educational situations and can be thought of as educational tensions. Educational tensions are complex problems which involve grappling with, and possibly dialoguing between diverse or contrasting factors that matter educationally. When and how do I bring myself into my teaching, and when do I hold back from doing so? When do I quietly support a student who is lacking confidence, and when (and how) do I challenge them? When and how do I resist department and school authorities’ plans or practices? And so on.

One approach is to collapse the tensions, perhaps by concretising them into “if x, do y” algorithms. Another is to embrace the chaos by concluding that it simply a matter of ‘balance’, which often ends up being whatever compromised position one ends up taking, retroactively justified. Sometimes we surrender to an ad hoc alliance between our motivations to control and our desire to abdicate responsibility. While it is inevitable (and good) that we develop habits thinking and action that categorise similar situations together (and from which arises the possibility of categorical responses in turn), two complex situations may be similar along many key dimensions but require very different approaches. Complex dynamic situations have too many parts, ill defined parts, and are changing on their own and through our interaction with them. When to go with existing habits and when to doubt them? Another educational tension.

Getting a sense of how things hang together and develop, where they might go, and one’s place in the ecology, is an ongoing aesthetic process, and responding requires artistry. But what is required to respond with artistry, and what does it mean for teacher education programmes? Artistry too is a kind of alliance between intervening in situations and letting things be. But it is hardly ad hoc, nor can it be smothered by the word ‘balance’. Artistic resolution is not some comfy ‘it depends’. It does depend, preciously so, but sometimes the situation calls one to take risks so extreme they fall outside even the boundaries we thought defined the tension. Other times not. What guides how even this educational tension –between doing and letting be– comes together, and how to know if we have been led astray? What guides an artist? What guides a teacher?

Teacher educators might begin by telling student teachers about the complexity and need for artistry. I think this is not likely to be effective (for several reasons). Nor would simply ‘modelling’ artistry in one’s own practice suffice (also for several reasons, starting with it not being clear whether ‘modelling artistry’ is an oxymoron: to model it well, must forget we are modelling?). Both telling and modelling may be necessary, but neither are sufficient. They do not cut to the heart of the matter.

I suggest attending to the heart of educational tensions is deeply interconnected with attending to one’s heart, and that this is where teacher educators should start. The perception of an educational tension is felt as a tension in one’s body. Sitting in a problematic situation means sitting in uncomfortable feelings. Conversely, perceiving and attending to the problems that call us connect us to what we care about. Our educational tensions are not generic, and they find us.

The relationship between an educational tension we perceive and the corresponding tension we feel is the context for the possibility of artistry in teaching, but also why artistry is too often evaded. It sometimes hurts to be so called, but it is the kind of gratifying pain that draws the artist back to her easel or fretboard.

We sometimes settle on a solution that addresses the tension arising in our body rather than the situation our heart resonated with and called us to attend. We forget the cord. We deny the invitation. Sometimes this means we flee entirely, but often it means we decide some course of action is “good enough” and release ourselves from the burden of its presence. Exhaustion and fear (of uncertainty, failure, embarassment, etc) can also drive teachers (and the education system generally) towards premature resolutions. Competing pressures on time and a culture that does not value deep attention co-conspire with this drive towards goodenoughism. “Good enough” is sometimes good enough, especially when responding to tensions we face from tasks imposed but meaningless. But goodenoughism can be bad faith, a sleight of hand trick we concoct to lose contact, with our selves and with the other in a single puff of smoke, without seeing clearly that we have done so.

The kind of attitude one has towards what one works with contours the space of possibilities for engaging with it. For example, being fearful contorts how we are able to face and engage with uncertainty, whether we are willing to change opinions, ‘stick to our guns’, or be open to otherness, not to mention our stamina in holding genuine and ongoing concern for where it is all going. Unlike fear, care is an emotion/attitude that orients towards tensions differently. If we care about something, we will not settle on a solution that is simply good enough to calm us into not worrying about it. An artist that cares about a piece may rework a painting for hours and days even if they had thought it was ‘almost finished’. Artists do not aim for ‘good enough’ in what matters to them. They are guided by tensions in what they work with, and will not settle on shortcuts that anaesthetise their engagement too early. They keep themselves connected, and com-passion orients their endeavours. (This does not imply ‘perfectionism,’ which itself denies artfully encountering the tension discussed earlier, between intervening and letting things be.) The attitude artists manifest immerses good teachers too.

But why care, especially if it can lead to sleeplessness? Or if a ‘perfect’ outcome is not possible anyway? For those who fear caring, care seems like putting oneself in an unnecessarily vulnerable position. It seems like precarious sacrifice. It certainly doesn’t seem relaxing. But those who have devoted themselves to caring know the kind of beauty that can arise when participating in the ecology of the heart: that sacred feedback loop between more deeply encountering and responding to otherness, and more deeply encountering and responding our own selves. We grow as people, into new distinctions, nuances, pains and delights, as we grow more perceptive and engaged in the needs and possibilities of another. Care holds us back from overdetermining or underdetermining a situation. It has us revisit and recalibrate as our ongoing perception of the situation reforms itself.

Maybe teacher education should acknowledge and theorise such matters. More importantly, it needs to make space for student teachers to experience caring through educational tensions. For example, educational tensions arise naturally during placements. Picking up on the tension new teachers feel, mentors and others quickly try to provide solutions. If we believe care matters, then caring for a new teacher’s cares also matters. This raises its own educational tensions for the teacher educator, and along with it the possibility of heartfelt artistry.

May 5, 2023

Education’s Copernican Revolutions

Do you remember when you learned the Earth revolved around the Sun? I certainly don’t. But why not? It is such a surprising fact, one astonishing enough to deserve inducing its own ‘flashbulb memory.’ Its surprise cuts in several ways. First, there is the obviously strange idea that we live on a sphere with no direction up and yet we do not fall off. Second, is the idea that we are constantly in movement, and moving very quickly too, around a giant ball of fire over a 100 times bigger than our own planet. This movement, this speed, and the spherical shape of the Earth are not felt in direct experience. Learning that the Earth revolves around the Sun is therefore a moment where we see that the way the world ‘appears’ is significantly different from what it ‘actually’ is. It is like Plato’s cave, but without the need for a convoluted metaphor. The duality between appearance and reality has reappeared in countless ways in human thought, but the Copernican revolution remains one of the most visceral possible encounters with this split.

That I do not remember learning it implies to me I learned it too early. There is a point when we can be told something without ‘getting’ why it is significant, and so when we do come to understand what the ideas means we do not feel its significance. It is almost like how children come to understand the meaning of words. Using them first, and gradually getting a more nuanced sense of the contexts they can be used, and only much later thinking about what the words actually mean. We seem to have a similar pragmatic engagement with ideas about the world, where ideas often regulate activity first and are only sometimes later popped out of this field of immersive, unreflected upon usage, to be engaged explicitly.

If not the Copernican revolution then perhaps there is some other idea that came to you at just the right time. The significance of its truth hit you like a thunderbolt, clutching your imagination, seizing your heart. What if there was only 100 such amazing ideas in our world, and say 15 more yet to be discovered? We do not know how many mind-bending ideas await discovery, and many of us hope there are an infinite in store. But it could be that all have been discovered, or that there are only finite left, or that it simply becomes too expensive (economically, ecologically, etc.) to keep discovering them. If we do not know, do we assume amazing ideas are a renewable resource, to be mined ad infinitum? Or do we treat such ideas with the same care and attention we ought to treat any potentially limited resource? What is the ‘sustainable’ approach to engaging with amazement or wonder?

One approach would be to dismiss the problem altogether. Even if there are just a few such ideas, it does not matter. The primary purpose of such knowledge is for it to be ‘used’, not for whatever effect ‘realising’ it may or may not have. The quicker people know how genes, atoms, solar systems, electricity, ecologies, etc ‘work’, the more able they will be in engaging responsively or productively in the world. From this counterargument, one might even suppose that the basic structure of the world ought to be learned quite early, so it is ‘first nature’ just like one’s mother tongue, rather than counterintuitive facts to be wrestled clumsily and spoken of with a lisp.

I do not know if that is true for some ideas. For example, perhaps there are ways of understanding the animals, plants and weather in one’s local ecology that seem to depend on early immersion to achieve fluency. But many of the big ideas I have in mind are not the kind with daily practical implications. Most of us continue to say ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ and navigate our homes or towns as though the earth was flat. So, let’s assume I am specifying the kind of scientific (but also philosophical, spiritual, etc.) ideas that have significant possible impact on humans conceptualise themselves and their place in the world, but not the kind likely needed for any obvious use in our quotidian lives.

If we can agree that there at least some ideas that are powerful but without immediate application in such daily contexts, and that such ideas can be taught at the wrong time, or the wrong pace, then some educational questions follow:

If there is a finite number of such powerful ideas, when and how should they be taught? My pedagogical intuition is that we should be slow and careful, inviting and provoking particular students in response to interests, thoughts and feelings we see developing in them. But until there is a broader understanding of the role of slowing such knowledge down, parents, the media, and others will surely ‘let the cat of the bag’ too early despite our discretion. I view this as short-circuiting students’ capacity for enchantment and nothing short of a normalised infringement on the rights of a child. It leads to people educated with a head full of facts but undernourished and underskilled in exploring emotions associated with such facts. It is also likely a violation of nature.
Is it possible to recover some sense of the power of such ideas even after we have habituated to them? If so, how? What kind of meditation, discussion, prompts, activities, language or art, or thought experiments might re-sensitise? Note that the answer to this would address a bigger education problem: our tendency to take many things for granted in our lives, and the benefits of reawakening feeling towards them.
If there are only a finite number of such ideas still undiscovered, then what pedagogical implications does this have for how we ought to pursue further inquiry into nature? Where do we slow down? Are there some questions which we simply let be unanswered? And how do we communicate such societal questions to students? Is it important to protect the eros of our encounter with the world in a pornographic age? And does the mystery we protect tell us something important about the world in turn, like how the fog on a mountain accentuates its contours while hiding its face?

April 13, 2023

Ecological and existential barriers to interdisciplinary

This blog post takes an ecological approach towards understanding interdisciplinarity, opening questions about the purpose and consequences of different ways of keeping disciplines separated, intermingling, or fused. By extension, I explore how an ecological approach might inform the kind of interdisciplinary thinking we might need to conceive, evaluate and respond to the inter/disciplinary challenges currently faced. Here, I am particularly concerned with the existential sides of engaging in interdisciplinarity and how these ‘ecologise’ with different facets of human and biotic worlds.

Interdisciplinarity is often promoted for the benefits new knowledges play in addressing social, economic or ecological problems. One concern is that siloed knowledge leads to actions and attitudes based on partial premises, and dialogue between silos can achieve a more holistic picture of phenomena. Undoubtedly the interdisciplinary conversation between, say, coral reef biologists and atmospheric scientists helps understand the causes of, and steps forward in addressing, mass bleaching of these wondrous systems. But does it follow that interdisciplinarity is always good ‘ecologically’?

Through dynamic interactions between relata, ecologies maintain certain variables while changing others. They develop ‘dynamic equilibria’ (Kauffman 1993), patterns of stability across space and time, which become enabling conditions for the organisation and emergence of complexity. For example, while a species of bee and flower may in principle evolve in diverse ways, in practice they mutually specify the range and rates of change of the other (Maturana and Varela 1992) -at least until dependence relationships break down.

Disciplines and interdisciplines are also involved in a range of ecological dynamics. They are not only patterns of knowing, they are also patterns interacting with the world. These interactions can become very complex, affecting, among many other things, the ‘psychology’ of the knower. Our epistemological and existential needs also regulate rates of being and becoming in the relationships they constitute. These may be dangerous (dysecological), healthful, or either or both, at different temporal and spatial scales.

An ecological approach to knowing suggests sometimes even false premises will be ‘used’ for the stabilities they produce. Plastic in the ocean becomes a niche for new ecosystems, a faulty theory may still be the basis for a prosperous academic career. In the ecological and existential dimensions of interdisciplinarity, errors can become true through the relations they come to sustain. But such scaling out eventually leads to laissez-faire relativism. We need to make a cut. Ought we see how different ecologies emerge on different scales, within and without, before we do so? How do we learn to give up some cherished ecologies when we come to see others as more important? How can education approach these problems?

Some scholars have suggested there is a magical moment two disciplines cross boundaries and meet one another (Angerer). ‘Magic’ suggests positive qualities seen characteristic of an interdisciplinary experience: a sense of suspense, of surprise, of enchantment, perhaps a feeling the synthesis appearing before consciousness is the result of some subterranean sleight-of-hand work in our personal or social physiologies. I have felt something ‘magical’ in the arising of new ideas and insights when seemingly separated rivers come to ramble together. But I also sometimes feel resistance, and I remember that magic has long been associated with the dark arts, a space where people fear to tread.

A discipline is a habitual way of attending the world, where people, boundaries, concepts, logics, practices, and materials, ecologise into a self-reinforcing groove. Much has settled into the unconscious, because we stop thinking about what we know well or do often. But a vibrant edge of novelty remains, like a magic froth on the invisible wave that carries us. As researchers, we may relish this edge; it gives opportunity to experience freshness, but within the safe contexts of a sensible matrix. We get our little adventures but we still get our home.

Interdisciplinarity demands a different psychology. What does it feel like to have the foundations of one’s home pulled away? Even the silent work sustaining our magic froth seems now at risk. Along with it, the decades of work invested into that way of worldmaking, the professional identities constellated around it, even the way it has simply given to the world a structure, a logos, a nest: there may even be inklings of a spiritual abyss gloaming in the distance. (Moreover, other people and perhaps species too have come to rely on the regularities arising from my habit, however ill conceived it may be). Add the pragmatic fact we have trained to see and act towards phenomena in a certain way, magnified our focus of a sliver of the world while backgrounding the unknown unknowns needed to sustain that gaze. Is it any wonder attempts at interdisciplinarity often have lackluster outcomes?

Some educational questions arise from thinking about this existential ecology:

Maybe all new thought is magical. It involves the birth of the new from the old, and with it our participation in the creation of the world. The more difficult and unexpected the birth, the more astonishing it may be, -and so how do we respond to the dynamics of stability and change in interdisciplinary education? Perhaps the psychology guarding the well-disciplined mind against radical novelty produces and protects something sacred in its arising, and it would be somehow desecrating or improprietous to force such confluences.

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to try to protect the ‘magic’ of an unexpectedly rare offspring when the cost of keeping disciplines separated is a thousand clumsy cuts into the also magical world outside of us. The ecologies of the mind retained at the expense of the ecologies around it. Cancer too is an ecology. Sustainability cannot concern solely with inner ecologies or outer ones, but with the interconnected dynamics between them. After all, hidden connections between things in the world are occluded by the disciplines, and the magic we experience in the novelty of knowing mirrors the magic felt at the revelation of the world. What kind of discipline or interdiscipline can perceive these dynamics and respond to them?

If current disciplinary structures need to be taken down urgently, what kind of disciplinarity follows, given ecologies necessarily sustain patterns and enabling conditions? What is an ecological approach to ecology? If there is no solution we must agree on, how to educate for pluralism in light of our existential needs?

September 8, 2022

Daoism, differential equations, and death: Offerings from the seasons

February is ending, 56 degrees latitude, east side island, eastside Atlantic. The world is still shivery but from sky to sky it is blossoming, and my inwardliness is also unfolding outward. The crocuses are sending orange and violet flames from the grass, but this time of growth does not belong to the plants. This blossom is of the Sun and the swift elemental energies it circulates into expression. An aggressive vigour develops the air, hurtles windy momentum, and light breaks new angles between buildings, new geometries cast almost daily now onto the city’s granite floor. My eyes can feel it even if my skin is attuned to a different spring, one that will only appear once lakes and oceans embrace these energies and contribute to them in turn.

Days have been getting longer with the northern tilt’s accelerating plummet toward the fire orb. The stretching of daylight is at first undetectable to my eyes and nose. Measured in seconds added to the day, the solstice holds winter in what seems a catatonic lull, ambiguous in its beginning and end -until one day it isn’t. The shift is felt in ways I live but do not always acknowledge. The alleyway I pass on my morning walk now glitters in light rather than shadow. The difference is felt but not cognised, the stroll feels brighter even if I do not pinpoint why.

The first climax of light will come this year on March 20th at 9:58 pm, but this climax like all celestial transitions, comes with its paradoxes.

Between March 10th and March 26th, days will be getting longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. Between winter solstice and this time, days were getting longer more and more quickly, after march, days will be getting longer more slowly. We are now rushing towards this peak in vim, after which will be its ageing and senescence. The official first day of birth is the first day of death. Ostara is an inflection point.

Growing up, our summer break always seem to coincide with my father grumbling that autumn had arrived: the days were now getting shorter (his unsolicited astronomical realism never seemed to raise its head during winter solstice). But as I contemplate the hurtling unfolding before me, it seems summer solstice is already the second autumn of the year (my father might be proud of this pessimistic observation). The rate at which days get longer begins to slow in March, decelerating to a standstill in June.

In other words, we are observing changes, and we are also observing changes to the rate of changes. The latter is what mathematicians call “first derivatives” of differential equations. The first derivative of velocity is acceleration. Let’s follow the seasons with an eye on such rates of change. From June until September, death will gain increasingly in vitality, days not only getting shorter but getting shorter increasingly quickly (and like the initial hiddenness of January’s Spring, this death is hidden for awhile by the slow transition and the lagging heat). When the heat begins to catch up a bit, the loss of light is in free fall and Mabon lurks. His first Spring a hidden bloom: beneath the autumnal gloom, with everything about us is withering back into the ground, the accelerating darknesses pivots and pulls away.

But does it end there?

The cos x curve depicts the rates of change of the sin x curve

If changes in daylight hours etch a sine curve into the galaxy, high school mathematics tells us that changes to these changes is a cosine curve. This is represented as f’(x)sin x = cos x. But the rate of change of the cosine graph is an inverse sine curve (-sin x). There is a technical term for this. The rate of change of acceleration is called “jerk” -a term which is almost certain to confuse any intuitive sense we have of what is going on in the passage of the seasons. Because all derivatives of the sin curve are oscillate with the same amplitude and frequency as the original curve, the only difference we should expect is phasic. But can we experience this?

I think we can. In fact, I have already alluded to it above. Between March 10th and March 26th, days get longer by 4 minutes and 40 seconds every day. This approximation hid the fact that the rate of change at which days were getting longer was itself changing extremely slowly. Days are getting longer more quickly, but longer more quickly more slowly. Compare this to the difference between December 23rd and 24th last year. On December 23rd there was 9 seconds more light than the 22nd. On December 24th, there was 17 seconds more light than on the 23rd. The rate of change in March is almost constant even though it is dramatic. The rate of change is in rapid flux in December even though it is imperceptible. There is a lull at the equinoxes too, but unlike the lull during the solstices, it is a lull where we stop feeling the days accelerating. For a week or so, they just seem to be in an almost steady acceleration.

I believe this is the end of what can be perceived (and this only with some difficulty). Who knows what if further derivatives are picked up on and responded to by other creatures? But the mathematics suggest that the extent to which life and death are intertwined in the seasons goes well beyond what has so far been suggested. The derivative of -sin x is -cos x, and the derivative of -cos x is sin x. After four derivatives, we return full circle. Although this cannot be felt or witnessed, it suggests something very powerful and subtle. Superficially, it evokes the four seasons that are themselves also indications of cyclicity. But the more luminous point is that with sin curves there are an infinite number of rates of rates of change, each an oscillating wave. There is no end in sight. In March, the rate in which the rate of change in daylight is changing, is itself changing too, this rate too is changing, and so on ad infinitum. Wrapped into the dynamics of the sine curve is an infinitely intricate conjoinment of slowing downs and speeding ups. Every inflection point is a turning point governed by a new inflection point.

The solstices and the equinoxes are all moments where solar expansion and withdrawal switch hands, one birthing process now dying, but within that dying another birth. This reveals in the most acute way a concrete and infinite dialectical contradiction.

On teaching oneself

It is for each teacher to figure out what kind of teacher they are.

At one point, I was very attracted to student-centred teaching, especially those models that broke down the teacher-student relationship in favour of a community of co-learners. I developed a school where the attempt to do this was itself a large part of the curriculum. I was attracted to Freire’s critique of banking education, and of the project-oriented Deweyan student. These approaches made sense. They seemed right, and not just in terms of my learning style. I also felt that such pedagogies were attempting to enact an attractive democratic vision that I’d like to see come alive writ large.

But I found very few, if any, situations where they seemed to ‘work’. Most often, students would complain about lack of structure, about excessive focus on process, and about not feeling like their errors were being corrected (students often have a healthy suspicion of the platitude ‘there are no right or wrong answers’). I confess to feeling that the aimless atmosphere evoked in these attempts often led me to lose confidence in my learning and in my educators’ capacity to facilitate such learning. The student centred teacher might be delighted to hear that their authority was being questioned. But I don’t think it was being questioned in the way they might hope. (They might be delighted in that too, but again for the wrong reasons).

I felt there was something missing but my conviction that such pedagogies must be right led me to fast and easy excuses: growing up in a system that so favours authoritarian approaches, I’d ask myself, is it any wonder that there is some bumbling about on the part of teachers and students in recreating democratic pedagogies? I was reminded of how I would analogously defend those rudderless moments in my community activism work. In that work, I often witnessed an abundant need for people to debate microdetails. I saw that being suddenly able to have strong agency in a collaborative process meant we now needed to learn that responsible agency is partly knowing when not to exercise agency. In both the classroom and the community, certain types of engagement with democracy can quickly lead people to yearn for the vision of the ‘benevolent dictator’ that provides a goal and context that people can work within. I am still unsure to what extent time and experience might render such process-oriented approaches more effective and satisfying.

As time passes, I become less convinced that my students’ need for a teacher to explain things, correct errors, reveal interests and passions, and guide the classroom is merely a matter of students being unable to “understand their own rights because they are so ideologized into rejecting their own freedom, their own critical development, thanks to the traditional curriculum” (Shor and Freire, 1987, p. 21). In this same chapter, these authors discuss the aesthetics and artistry of being an educator. A key idea, but they seem to miss an essential point. Students want to experience an aesthetic phenomenon. This means an experience where there is a discernable integrity between the whole and the parts. They want to experience something crafted with mastery. Fraying ad hoc tangents, inexplicable eddies, a convoluted narrative arc that leads nowhere -there are many ways that an overly passive teacher can disrupt the relationship between the parts of the class. This forfeiture of responsibility is felt – it does not make sense rhythmically or melodically- and it reduce the student’s trust in the learning experience not because students need an authority but because they yearn to experience an author.

This is truer than ever in the dialogic student-centred classroom. I suspect that students will themselves be keen to collaborate in co-authoring the art of a developing classroom if they see their educator take up the challenge. In asking students to engage authentically in democratic and dialogical classrooms, we are asking them to make themselves vulnerable. If the educator hides their own vulnerability behind the opaque role of ‘facilitator,’ students will hardly feel free to open themselves up. By way of invitation, provocation, solidarity, and good faith, a teacher can show how and why their heart, and everyone else’s, matters. Their own fumbles can then be seen as parts of a whole they are trying to work on, the whole being of course their own integrity as people and as educators. The aesthetic nature of the classroom will come out in the relationship between the ways teachers present themselves as a whole and what they do to move towards this vision of themselves in their particular actions. Devoid of this part/whole relationship, the student is left without the content/context interplay that is so key to developing meaningful understanding of what is happening (this leads to hermeneutic analogies).

We can invite students into their hearts by showing our own in many different ways. When looking back at the various teachers that have made an impact on me, few ‘approaches’ are common to them. Some were strict, some playful. Some experimented pedagogically while others took traditional didactic styles. One especially exciting teacher was fiercely didactic. When Zev Friedman would stand at the podium, clutching both sides of it, his crooked reading glasses poised on his nose, my heart would thrum and shiver at the beautifully serious struggle, the momentous spiritual stakes at hand in details usually depicted as boring or souless concerns of canonical 17th and 18th Century philosophers. This was no academic brain game. A quiet profundity pervaded Dr. Friedman’s world and allowed him to reach into and draw out those same depths in the thinkers we studied. He dared to share it and I fell back in love with philosophy at a time when other course made it seem like egoistic head trips. What seemed to make a difference had nothing to do with some pedagogical principle he was applying. It was instead all about the extent to which I sensed his emotional engagement with his subject. It was an empathic response.

I remember being equally drawn to moments where a teacher would reveal excitement, fear, even despair.

Teacher educators often talk of ‘modeling reflective practice’. How might we model emotional response? How can this be anything but a contradiction? Might emotions be the very things that slip past our attempts to model, -glints and pulses of life breathing through the machine?

An educator might slip unconsciously from honestly exposing themselves to their students one year to expressing the same idea in a formulaic way the next. I have found myself often tempted by this and have occasionally succumbed. I treat my moments of authentic engagement as having given rise to tools that can now be applied to generate authenticity. I have occasionally done this in full awareness that it is impossible and contradictory, knowing full well that authentic engagement is not about applying the past to the present but about showing up to what the current situation has to offer. I have even done this (ah, the absurdities of the human soul!) in describing this very problem itself.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Occasionally such stories can play a role because stories do have a life of their own, because experience is cyclical, because the present is often not so unique as to constantly require a radically new response. Sometimes I can respond to the current situation through how I tell the story, allowing it to be in reciprocal relation with what is around me (like replaying a piece on the piano in fresh awareness of it in all its immediacy). But the more times I tell it, the better I get at telling it, the more I sense it lose colour. Raw emotional expression is vulnerable to the same technocratic thinking that pervades all ‘what works’ approaches, mechanising itself to the purpose of mechanised relations.

The mask is fake… but the mask is also real. Looking back on times I have exposed some aspect of my inner horror or guilt about the ecological crisis, I find there to be something tentative in its first expression. In some way, it is was ridiculously honest and unfiltered. It had not been turned into a story or style or approach (yet). But it was still a performance. I knew I was being listened to, in some cases by two dozen or more people. I felt acutely the radial concentration of consciousness in the room, with me as the hub of the wheel. Such an experience sometimes draws out and magnifies the emotion I was am to convey, like a concave glass concentrating the rays of the sun. In a sense, I became even ‘truer’ than I am normally capable of. It became a piece of music that I was inside of. Per-form. “Per” means through, thoroughly, very, utterly, all around – how I can be so utterly formed through those all around me!

Such is the fate of ‘masks.’ Sometimes our performance brings out something authentic, indeed it develops our range of experiences and self-understanding. Other times it robs us of ourselves. Each performance has its fate, sizzling out of truth or groping towards it, sometimes hiding from it entirely.

How often a scholar’s ‘expertise’ lies precisely in the topic they seem to lack in skill and grace! An expert in care pedagogy fails to make eye contact with me when we meet. An advocate of interspecies interactions tramps loud and thoughtless in the forest. A theorist developing a concept of authentic student-teacher relations lectures behind a thick authoritative facade. Why is that? I believe it evokes a purity of heart long corrupted. Initially, we read and write because we yearn to grow. Oftentimes we are passionate about things we recognise are important but are not very good at. We write because we want to improve, knowing that in putting our strengths towards developing our sacred weaknesses, our heart’s ‘deep gladness meets the world’s deep need’ (as Parker Palmer would put it). But somewhere along the line, we confuse our expertise in writing and theorising about the topic with expertise in the topic itself! Piles and piles of “know that” fill the space still empty of “know how.” In this circuitous way, passion suffocates itself. A culture of academic posturing makes this slip into hidden inauthenticity all the easier.

I think we need to recognise and resist this transformation. As people, as teachers, as researchers, we need to recognise that vulnerability is our asset. We must even guard against becoming ‘experts’ in vulnerability. It is not a turf or territory to be defended, but an attitude to cultivate. It is an attitude that dissolves itself at high altitudes.

Immersed in such questions, I raised them in an exploration with a student, rich peaceful pauses. At one point in the conversation, she mentioned that she has some traits that she “prefers” in herself (one was kindness), and that she consciously reminds herself throughout the day to potentiate these dimensions of herself. It struck me how her list was different from mine (I find myself constantly wanting to work towards humility, astonishment, gratitude). Why were our lists different? Why was I attracted to certain types of experiences and enactments? At this moment, the glow of my desk light illuminating the room more prominently with the sun now set, I realised how pervasive the dialectics of the soul are at work. I know the power and beauty of humility because I have experienced it, but I have experienced its awesome power because I am not always a humble person. Someone who is often or always humble is immersed in the state, so it is nearly invisible in the accustomed background of their being. We contain within us the shadow side (this was her term, perhaps invoking Jung) of each of our most inspiring characteristics, a shadow which tortures but also teaches us the meaning of what we are capable of and the importance of striving for it. Chiaruscuro. I asked her about her kindness and she said she felt that she was sometimes kinder and sometimes much less kind than most people around her.

It often seems I have access to the feeling that life is an astonishing and wondrous event, as utterly beautiful as it is contingent and fleeting, and indeed this sense guides me in my pedagogy and my research. I am lucky that for me there is no choice but to let this feeling, both delicate and powerful, guide me into my best teaching and writing moments. But the excitement of these moments is contrasted by my passages through mazes of ungrateful doubt and self-deprecation. This darkness is exacerbated because I can still know the powerful lightness that suffuses everything, I remember it and can conceptualise it as a statement of fact all through my interminable journey into the night. But such knowing is not enough to pull me out.

We lean towards our vocation through acknowledging and being open to the generative tension between our poles, embracing the drawn string that we can pluck and strum to bring our tunes to the world, the gifts we’ve been given to give, modulating as music often must, between the minor and major key. I can teach this truth by struggling towards unification in front of my students, inviting them to assist, and supporting them (if and when they are ready) to identify and integrate the poles of their own soul. De-ossifying dualisms back into dialectics.

Contemplating contemplation II: Dewey’s “qualitative thought”

This is a further development of an earlier blogpost, entitled “Contemplating Contemplation”

Given the logocentric tendencies of modern western culture, it is unsurprising that the need for a contemplative approach has been systematically disparaged and neglected. Even Derrida, arch critic of logocentrism (1976), with his busy weaving and winding of words, could hardly escape its grasp. Education theorists who do venture broader conception of thinking and embodiment are quickly contained; liquidated of their explorations in secondary interpretations. This is perhaps most striking in the case of John Dewey (Pappas, 2016). For Dewey, language and linguistic thinking was a small fraction of embodied cognition, which he referred to as “qualitative thought.” He considered qualitative thought to be the non-reflective, non-linguistic, affective and evolving base that contextualises lived situations. As a base, it contextualises everything that occurs in a situation, including the forms of logical thinking that emerge in it. As such, Pappas and others (ex. Johnson 2008) strongly critique the attempt to sequester Dewey’s (1916; 1930) observations about qualitative thought to soft subjects, like art and aesthetics, and insist that this embodied affective dimension is key to understanding even (and perhaps especially) the processes underlying the seemingly coolest empirical work or most austere and abstract reasoning. Recognizing the phenomenological dimensions of American pragmatism, they seek to bring to contemporary awareness an observation pithily captured well over a century ago by William James: “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” (James, 1890, p. 256). (Here is a lecture by Mark Johnson, one of the leading philosophers working to heal the right between thought, feeling, and the body).

The result of this Deweyan fracture has had reaching impacts educational considerations. One of his most popular applied ideas is certainly his famous reflective loop (1910), arcing thinking and action in an experiential circuit. The originary and ongoing role of the qualitative dimension of thought is pervasively ignored in popularized descriptions of this concept, rendering it a seemingly mechanical process. This ignorance reflects the epistemological bias of his readers rather than his position (Alexander 2013). An education that recognizes the importance of qualitative experience, seeks to develop skills in which people can pay attention to them as a necessary part of devoting oneself to understanding and developing thought. This follows from the fact that a qualitative dimension is both the fountain and foundation for any logos. To do this, what is needed is more explicit contemplative pedagogies.

With contemplative approaches, we learn to slow ourselves down. This can assist in thinking in copious ways, one of which is that it enables us to examine single propositions. We can take a single claim which we have (unreflectively or reflectively) assumed as true, and let ourselves explore the relationship between that proposition and the more-than-linguistic reality it births from and seeks to describe. It takes seriously the notion that “language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought” (John Dewey LW 5:250). In so doing, it unhinges us from a dogmatic allegiance to what James and Dewey called “intellectualism.” James (1909) described it in these terms:

We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of “nothing but” that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought.

But key to the success of such an approach is a release from the obsession with the relationship between epistemology and language -from correlationism. To understand the qualitative context out of which a linguistic articulation emerges, we must be able to let ourselves experience and pay attention to the unique character of the situations we find ourselves in. This involves cultivating openness, which means (in different situations) self-compassion, a sense of wonder, humility, appreciation, and peace (we shall have a sense to explore how these are connected). Openness depends upon, and yet enables these and other affects developed through contemplative approaches. One consequence of openness is that inquiry will involve moments -many moments in fact- where the mind drifts from its object of attention. It accepts this movement because openness develops trust that the mind may be at work even if progress is not clear and available to conscious thought, either in conceptual terms or in in felt experience. The emotions, feelings, and thoughts that emerge from a particular focus must be allowed freedom to flow as they may. Paying attention to qualitative thought therefore means letting it evolve as it will. If the conscious mind seeks to police what type of thought is allowed or type of feeling experienced, it will tend to conform understanding of the topic at hand to preset contours. When this inversion occurs, such thinking redirects the quality of the lived situation from which it emerged. While this may be necessary at certain stages of understanding (here is where Dewey’s very specific use of the term “instrumentalism” comes in –where a purpose for intervening in the situation is taken up and the relationship with one’s environment coordinated thereby), it goes against the very nature of exploration. In other words, it may that some of the thoughts and feelings we have are indeed “tangents.” The flow of experience is such that unconnected ideas, feelings, or thoughts do jump into the current. At some point, we will need to make a decision about what is relevant and what is not relevant in our understanding of our topic. The point is only that this decision cannot be made ahead of time without stifling clearer listening, and consequently better responsiveness and creativity.

Given the famous (and now quite old) stories of Kekule, Poincare and others, the more-than-rational “logic of discovery” should really be at the forefront of education. An attentiveness, an openness and the capacity to receive, has been repeatedly shown to be a necessary (but not sufficient) element in creative and scientific endeavors. But its value extends far beyond these spheres. One area of crucial importance is the ethical dimension. In this fast moving world, with the urgency of the ecological crisis ever looming, can we allow ourselves remain in a state of ethical perplexity, patiently awaiting the consolidation of a proper response? It seems that the skill will become increasingly difficult as it becomes evermore necessary, as the demand for panic-alleviating solutions drives easily accessible cognocentricism. Can the jump to Deweyan instrumentality before adequately engaging in Deweyan listening do anything but exacerbate what is likely also a crisis in our capacity to attend? I suspect that navigating between panic and patience will become a defining challenge for environmental education in this century.

References

Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research. doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1699026

Alexander, T. (2013). The human eros. New York: Fordham University Press.

Derrida, J (1976), Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Dewey, J. (1930, 1984). Qualitative thought. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, Vol. 5 (pp. 243-262). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, J. (1916). Essays in experimental logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. DC Heath and Co.

James, William (1909/1979) The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’, Harvard University Press, pp. 135-136.

James, William (1890). Principles of psychology, Volume 1. Dover.

Johnson, Mark (2008). The meaning of the body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pappas, Gregory F. (2016). John Dewey’s radical logic: The function of the qualitative in thinking. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52(3), 435-468.

Contemplating contemplation

As educators, we often hope or assume that providing information about the pressing sustainability challenges we face is sufficient to help humanity change course. This may be facts about the crises before us, facts about the natural, social, and cultural systems in decline, facts about possible feasible alternative courses. Many weary of information-based approaches to education advocate for conceptual, worldview or value shifts. Many still insist that the problem is not merely the content of the environmental educator’s lesson but also the process, with calls for education that is more experience-based, issue-based, place-based, constructivist. For some, this has also meant that learning be participatory with the nonhuman beings and processes -to name a few.

The trend away from abstract content and towards meaningful contextualised activities and actions is a positive one. However, it is not sufficient. This paper suggests a different, complementary approach to pedagogy. Information, worldviews, experiences, and issues are experienced, processed, taken up or ignored in diverse ways depending on the person and their circumstances. The same seemingly compelling issue can be approached with gusto, hesitation, or downright terror depending on a number of interacting factors, including past experiences, one’s capacity for sustained reflection, current emotions and general moods, social circumstances, and even on whether or not one has had an adequate meal before the lesson. There are no simple linear causal relationships in this vast evolving ecology of interacting factors. An acontextual approach to process is not much of an improvement over an acontextual approach to content.

Given this complexity, one approach to education might be to focus on generalities. Perhaps it is possible to ascertain the sorts of approaches that work for most people and to employ such approaches in schools and other settings. This would seem the most obvious approach both for educators and for researchers. The experimental design would be relatively straightforward, the implications for practice easy to roll out, and the securing of funding for the research feasibly attainable in a climate that favour statistical generality as serious and reliable knowledge. There are obvious merits to this approach. Perhaps most striking is not its instrumental benefit but its psychological value. Especially given the urgency of contemporary problems, we may feel the need for something secure to stand on and to build upon. It would seem better to be able to make tentative, though applicable claims rather than to simply wallow in a messy web of “it depends.”

Except that, of course, it does depend. Any particular generality will be grounded in particular contexts which may or may not be adequately acknowledged, and which are themselves changing, however slowly. It might be that in the short term educating about mass species extinction propels people into action while in the long term it fosters resignation. It may be the other way around. It may be one way with one population and another with another. A generality may appear on one temporal scale but disappear on another. While all pedagogy is context dependent, this is especially true for topics which are emotionally or existentially heavy -which is obviously the case for increasingly weighty net of crises we are wrapped in.

A second reason for concern is that pedagogy based on evidence-based generalities only teaches to the bell curve. This expediency leads to another nonlinearity. Those on the edges of the bell curve can be pushed in dangerous directions through the very approaches deemed successful for the majority. A small number of disaffected students may wreak great havoc on one’s pedagogical aims. It would be a ridiculous and complex calculation to figure out when and whether the ends justify the means here, especially in cases where those outside the mean are also those most likely to end up in positions of power.

A third reason for concern is that focusing on generalisable tricks and approaches treats education as something that an educator does to an educated. Even (or especially) when the generalization works, it sets up a situation where sustainability is ultimately an external and extrinsic imposition, rather than an autonomous, decentered generative process.

We look for and expect simple linear causal interactions. It makes our job as educators easier. There is a human (well, biotic) tendency to look for patterns to economize energy and time resources is part of this too. The sometimes desperate yearning for a way to teach for sustainability is born out of this.

I suggest and want to explore a different approach largely based on my experiments teaching a Master’s level course called “Educating for Environmental Citizenship.” Offered is a pedagogy that accepts the finitude of human knowing, casts suspicion on atemporal solutions, and seeks to foster humility, wonder, and resilience before the magnificent challenges that lie ahead. The aim is to catalyse the development of lifelong contemplative skills (this work fits into the constellation of ideas gathered together in a recent compilation (edited by Eaton, Hughes, and MacGregor 2017). For example, instead of trying to figure out what makes people engage in sustainability, such a pedagogy might aim to help people develop the capacity to pay attention to the various and evolving motivating and demotivating factors that occur in their own daily lives. This perhaps seems, on the face of it, an easy thing to do, but the fact is we are mostly oblivious to the way in which ideas, emotions, beliefs, knowledge, and social dimensions interact over time. And a stock of favoured theories, however habitual, parsimonious, or elegant, often obfuscates direct engagement with this complexity while cloaking ignorance in fancy and fanciful security. Luckily, as educators we do not need to figure this out in order to educate. In fact, we cannot do so. Cultivating a contemplative attitude requires attempting a contemplative pedagogy, where the educator dwells in confusion, combines grace and self-doubt, succeeds or fails. If teachers are not able to unshackle their own learning process, they will hardly be able to responsively work with others in doing the same. It is only through gaining a greater capacity to understand ourselves as thinking, growing, feeling, and acting beings that we can come to appreciate the sheer immensity of the ecology we are both within and to which we contribute. This does not involve abandoning generality entirely, but rather restoring it within the dynamic balance of two forms of observation. Education ought to help students develop appropriate generalities about themselves as well as the skill of abandoning generalities when they lose their helpfulness (see Affifi (forthcoming) for more on this dialectic). As citizens of the universe, we are continually pulled between the general and the specific, as patterns and their ruptures co-occur ubiquitously both within and without.

***

Contemplative approaches are unlike reflexive or reflective approaches. Reflective approaches are primarily cognocentric, that is to say they involve thinking as their primary tool (Eaton, Davies, Williams, and MacGregor, 2017). In particular, they are metacognitive, in that they usually involve thinking about thinking. Thinking is an activity that makes certain demands on time. When thinking happens it has a range of rates of change within which it can occur. If the rate of change is too slow, thinking does not occur. It is a river that dries up when it does not flow at a certain speed. When success is viewed primarily as the capacity to develop new thoughts about something, anxiety can easily emerge in arid times. The mind will want to stay within a thinking modality at all costs, and as we shall see some of these costs are expensive. As such, reflective approaches demand that a certain rate of progress of occurs.

The main methods that reflective approaches have for breaking down habitual ways of thinking are critique and synthesis. Critique generally involves employing ready-made ways of analysing assumptions, ways that are themselves habituated thought processes. Likewise, while synthesis involves the combining or recombining of ideas and methods, it depends upon styles of argument that either one has had in the past or has acquired through learning from others.

In general, reflective approaches do not provide the space and time for other resources to engage in developing understanding. A cognocentric approach tends towards greediness, we strive for answers with hands outstretched and grasping. We seize the idea that comes to mind that seems good enough, often without even knowing it. To consider carefully whether “good enough” is itself good enough might break the flow of the thought that has just emerged and lead us right back to the arid void. And so, we often build up and tear down compositions made like prefabricated LEGO blocks, and scarcely open ourselves up to the harder work of considering whether these LEGO blocks really are the shapes that we think they are. Or the shapes we want or need. The resources needed for this work come from a different space than pure thought (whatever that is). It is a space that runs parallel to thought at all times but which constantly runs the risk of being ignored for the rich resource it is, and trampled over when thought is elevated in exclusive importance. The resources I am referring to are the feelings of the body, emotions, and the various ways and degrees to which we are conscious of them. The skills we need to develop would equipe us to pay attention to these feelings, to how they emerge, persist and evolve, and to how thought eventually takes them up and organises them in different ways, contributing to the feelings themselves as it transforms them.

What this involves is reconceptualising the nature of the process of understanding. Instead of considering understanding as primarily a cognitive process, we now recognise that cognition itself is better considered as one component of a set of skills and experiences. (Alternatively, we could simply redefine cognition, stripping it of its computeristic analogies and restoring to it the role of feelings, body and the environment). Violence is done to the whole person and consequently to the world when this field of skills and experiences is backgrounded and a sub component within it –thought– is elevated in importance and falsely considered to be the creative engine propelling things along. A contemplative approach is primarily seen as an antidote to this kind of epistemological greediness and it does so through opening up a space. It opens up a space through developing the capacity in people to be patient – patient without an answer, without progress, without immediately jumping too readily available building blocks. It develops a sense of trust that the ecologies of the soul are more-than-conscious and more-than-personal, percolating at rates that do not always conform to our conscious demands. Most importantly, it does not do this through another cognocentric move. It does not seek to convince a thinker to trust ambiguity, uncertainty, regress, and the assorted confusions that come with paying attention. It is a lesson that cannot be provided by a Powerpoint slide or through a blogpost. Logic is easy, but cheap. The importance of contemplative approaches may easily be accepted if the argument given in defence of it is persuasive enough. But these argument alone are insufficient to equip anyone with the capacity to do the work of paying attention in these ways. For this reason, contemplative approaches are primarily experiential and the role that cognition plays within experience can only be fully understood by experiencing it in contemplative ways.

References

Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research. doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1699026

Eaton, M., Davies, K., Williams, S., and MacGregor, J. (2017). Why sustainability education needs pedagogies for reflection and contemplation. In Eaton et al. Contemplative approaches to sustainability in higher education (Chapter 1). London, UK:

Routledge.Eaton, M., Hughes, H.J., and MacGregor, J. (Eds.) (2017). Contemplative approaches to sustainability in higher education. London, UK: Routledge.